Digital humanities work, when carried out in an alternative space like Gallery Aferro, is not a neutral act. Our legacy work is undertaken in the context of being a community-based, artist-run space. The labor of photographing artwork or digitizing slides, and creating this website, is driven by our desire to further propagate Gladys Barker Grauer’s art and story and make it accessible and easily shareable, including across social media.
Digitizing the archive of Gladys Barker Grauer’s artwork photo slides was an important task to undertake because it allows us to share the largest possible collection of imagery and information about her practice. Many of these artworks are physically now in private or public collections. Having slides of your artworks was the standard professional practice for artists throughout the late 1980’s and 1990’s and up until the mid-2000’s. Although their use in the archiving of artwork images have been phased out by digital photography, the well organized binder Gladys Barker Grauer kept with slides of her artworks and the notes she took on each of those slides made it possible to contextualize more about her career, and thus share it with our intended audience of students, art lovers, researchers, curators, activists, writers, historians, and others.
It is our wish for viewers of this collection of images to understand that although a large portion of them are not perfect, they are exemplary of Grauer’s professionalism and commitment to her practice. The artworks pictured in this collection of slides easily span five or more decades: the earliest slide date we have information for is of a 1958 artwork, while several artworks were completed as recently as 2009.
To request access to full-size files please email info@aferro.org